


good grief

by jemmasimmns (laurellance)



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-28
Updated: 2018-05-28
Packaged: 2019-05-14 18:15:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14774697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laurellance/pseuds/jemmasimmns
Summary: The world doesn’t feel like falling when Quentin Lance dies, but to Sara it does. She runs; she can’t escape her feelings, she tried, she’ll try, and she’s likely always going to try, but she’ll put them on wits end, block them at every turn because she doesn’t want to deal with them right now.It’s probably how Nate finds her, sitting on the floor against the side of her bed, a bottle of alcohol in one hand and red tinted eyes that had shed to many tears to give more out.In which Sara and Nate have a discussion about the people they love, the people they lost and the people they left behind.





	good grief

The world doesn’t feel like falling when Quentin Lance dies, but to Sara it does. She runs; she can’t escape her feelings, she tried, she’ll try, and she’s likely always going to try, but she’ll put them on wits end, block them at every turn because she doesn’t want to deal with them right now.

It’s probably how Nate finds her, sitting on the floor against the side of her bed, a bottle of alcohol in one hand and red tinted eyes that had shed to many tears to give more out.

* * *

 

Sara returns to the waverider the minute the funeral ends. There’s too much in Starling City, too many entrances she’s been in, too many restaurants she’s had dinner in, too many buildings she’s been in for her to stay. She knows Oliver wants her to stay, and she knows that everyone’s hurting, but she can’t. She can’t explain it because she doesn’t want to, because losing a sister is shitty, but having her sister’s killer sacrifice himself for his goddamn daughter is a shame because she didn’t get the chance to kill Damien Darhk when all she wanted to do was just that, and now she’s lost dad.

Revenge doesn’t burn through her veins, and grief doesn’t pound against the walls of her skull demanding to be heard and she _misses_ it. She misses feeling the fresh agony that was screaming to the sky demanding answers for why good people died when the people that murdered them walked free to live another day, misses the desperate feeling that everything was overwhelming her and the burning desire to track the guilty down and avenge the dead, and find it did nothing because now she’s spent time doing something and her hands are still bloody and there isn’t a damn thing that’s changed internally.

She returns to the ship she’s called home ever since Rip Hunter recruited her to save humanity from Vandal Savage. She ignores the requests for contact from anyone on Team Arrow, from Ava, from the man in the sky, if he existed.

She wants to be alone.

It stays that way, her and the bottle of alcohol taken from Rip’s collection (don’t mention Rip, don’t mention Rip, don’t mention Rip, _don’t mention yet another person she cared for dead_ ). The seams of the wall are hardly the most intriguing thing about her room but she doesn’t want to move. She doesn’t want to care. She doesn’t want to leave, because this is security and this is safety and this is something she can control and she needs it, in a way she’s never needed it before.

Her family’s had their ups and downs. They’ve had periods where things went great and everything was happy, and they’ve had periods where no one wanted to talk to each other because all that they’d do was scream accusatory rumors and throw their mistakes to their faces to open and create new wounds to lick clean. They’ve lived through multiple deaths but they always come back from the dead, kicking the devil the face and vandalizing the gates of death to prove just how much life they had in them.

That was before Laurel died. That was Sara knew she had something so valuable she couldn’t bear to lose it, before she thought she could go into a deeper grief. She misses Laurel in a bone deep sense, in the damning truth that she _hated_ living in a world without her sister because everything was brighter when Dinah Laurel Lance was around and now she wasn’t and that was an injustice of the highest order. She missed Laurel that when it had truly hit her that her sister was gone, she held a knife to her captain’s throat and demanded that he allow her to change the timeline. She begged him to allow her to change the timeline, because she simply could not live in a world without her sister and he told her in those sad widower eyes of his that understood all too well what she was going through that she was one of the strongest people he knew. He wiped her tears away, and if that was a signal that she was gonna have to take care of herself, she must’ve missed the memo.

The captain’s office bears his memory. It bears his books and his papers and it bears the everlasting scent of him that’s buried deep within the furniture and the drinks and the historical records, and if she’s grieving him, then she’s not sure how she’s gone about doing it. It must be kicking in now, she thinks, and she hasn’t got it in her to scream and swear at the universe for being fucking assholes when all she wanted was to have her family around her, happy and loved.

Enter Nate.

Enter the one of the goddamned people she doesn’t want to talk to.

He sits down beside her and sighs, deep and worried, the dark circles under his eyes flourishing under the bright white light she has on. “I’d tell you I’m sorry,” he scoffs at this, “but you’ve probably heard it a million times that you don’t want to hear it again.”

Sara wants to laugh. Hysterically. “You’ve already said it. Fuck off.”

Nate grabs the bottle from her. “That wasn’t all I wanted to say.”

“So?” Sara settles for a sigh instead. “Say it, Nate.”

“Losing people sucks. It’s shitty and it isn’t fair and it’s natural. It’s as natural as breathing is.” Nate laughs at this, in part heartbreak, in part grieving his own losses. “I’ve spent the last I-don’t-know-how-long reading up on the history of Zambesi and I hate it. I hate it, Sara, I hate it so much.”

“Imagine the world’s smallest violin playing in the distance,” Sara tells him, “that’s what I’m thinking of right now.”

“It’s better than Ray coming in here, don’t you think?” Nate pauses for a second, staring at the lines in the walls Sara spent so much time enraptured in, “As much as I love him, and as much as I love Wally, they wouldn’t be good at comforting you.”

“You’re shit at comforting people too, you know.”

Nate gives a self depreciating laugh. “That’s the Toxic Masculinity of Heywood Men speaking. Grandpa and Dad say hi.

“Dad and Laurel say hi. They would’ve arrested you for getting past Oliver’s security.”

“Tell them I say hi back.” Nate peers at the bottle and turns his gaze back to the wall. “It sucks that you didn’t get to say goodbye. Both times.”

Sara scoffs. “What would you know of Laurel’s death? You weren’t abroad the waverider then.”

“I heard about it from Ray. He said you were pretty torn up about it.” Nate adds. “Mick said something but I ignored it.”

“Rip was there. He comforted me.” Sara tells him, and it feels like her chest loses some of the pressure. “He’s dead too. Isn’t that great? I should be happy, laughing with my on again, off again girlfriend and enjoying vacation, but I’ve grieving instead. That’s fucking _fantastic_.”

“I’d say something,” Nate tells her, “but you’d just tell me about the world’s smallest violin again.”

“You wanna exorcise some ghosts while you’re here, Nate? It’s not like it’ll change anything.” Sara waits for a response from Nate but he’s too slow. She pushes forward. “Rest in peace, dad. You deserved so much more than what you got.”

“Dad’s not dead, but he should be.” Nate’s voice has a darker tone to it, one of disgust and self loathing. “Fucking old man didn’t know when was the right time to say the right thing. Didn’t do a damn thing when I was growing up but yell at my mom because she was trying to protect a severely hemophiliac teenager from hurting himself accidentally.”

“Rest in pieces,” Sara holds up the bottle, “Damien Darhk. I’m sad I never got the chance to kill you when I should have.”

“You could always resurrect him and kill him all over again,” Nate suggests, and they both look so, so tired right now.

“Maybe I’ll take out your old man while I’m at it,” Sara cracks a laugh at a joke that wasn’t funny, “and tell the Bureau not to change it.”

“That’d be great,” Nate says before pausing once more. “Y’know what’s sad? I wouldn’t change the past for anything. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for what my granddad did, for just how shitty a parent my dad was. I met Amaya. I met the team. I got to meet my granddad and say goodbye to him when all my dad has are black and white photos that mean literally nothing to him.”

“As nice as that is,” as if nice was the right word to describe it, “there’s nothing in the world I want more than to see Laurel and Dad again.”

“What would you tell them? If you could see them one more time.” They’re both still sitting by the side of the bed, eyes towards the walls, not looking at each other. They’ve both got their own ghosts to deal with.

“I’d hug Laurel and tell I’m sorry for hurting her. I’d ask for her forgiveness. I’d tell her that I love her one last time.” Those heavy words fell like feathers from Sara’s tongue, and maybe it’s the alcohol talking, maybe it’s the grappling loneliness Sara feels. She’ll blame it on the alcohol. “And for dad? Maybe I’d say goodbye. Maybe I’ll tell him I love him, in case he doesn’t know, but I miss him. I want him back.”

And with that, tears that held back come springing from her eyes. Nate hands her some crumpled napkins from his pocket.

Nate releases a breath of air slowly, loudly exhaling. “I’d tell granddad about the future. Tell him about how times have changed and what I’ve done. Tell grandma I miss her.” Nate laughs at nothing in particular. “Maybe even tell them about dad. He was their only son, after all.”

“Don’t look at me, I don’t want to get pregnant.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever have kids. The only woman I dreamed of it with” and it sounds so silly now, in hindsight, “has her own destiny. I’ve never been a part of it.”

“Amaya was your first love, wasn’t she?”

“Yeah. I’m not sure how you get over someone as beautiful and kind as Amaya.”

“You’ll get over her,” Sara tells him, tentatively giving a squeeze that could barely be considered a hug. “Don’t worry.”

Nate tells her: “I tried once, getting over her. It didn’t work out very well.”

“You’ll have to actually get over her now.” Sara gives a small, sardonic smile, and her heart doesn’t feel as emotionless anymore. There’s something inside her that bleeds, and she lets it.

She welcomes it.

“You doing okay, Sara?” Nate asks her, after they spend a few minutes in listless silence entertained by things only they would understand.

“Worse than you, if I’m being honest.”

Nate smiles sadly. “Probably. You’ll get over it, we always do. We’re Legends, right?”

Sara doesn’t quite know how to respond to that. They’ve always been Legends, but after hearing Rip’s final goodbye, there’s something else to that word. Nate wouldn’t understand it, he had been too busy trying to save some version of Amaya. “We broke time.” She sounds broken, tone weak and without bite, but this was something she and Nate would never talk about when they left the room. “I don’t think that’s an achievement.”

This was a moment of mourning, and mourning was sacred.

Mourning was always sacred.

“We screw things up for the better, remember?” Nate tries to cheer her up but it fails, epically. “Sara, you knew the members of the waverider better than I did. You’re always going to know this ship better than me. It’s okay to miss them.”

“I’m the captain. The captain isn’t supposed to be _weak_ , Nate.” Sara scoffs, then and there. “Rip would drink because that’d be the only way he was able to cope with his grief. I learned that habit from him.”

“It’s not very healthy.”

“If you’d rather sit across from Leo Snart and that muppet lookalike of Stein he has, be my guest.”

Nate blanches at that. “I’ll pass.”

Sara chuckles at the reaction. “Thought so.”

“I guess exorcising our ghosts works.”

Sara points to the bottle. “I think that was the alcohol talking.”

Nate looks skeptical but doesn’t call her bullshit. She’s glad. “Right.” He takes the alcohol in one hand and uses the side of the bed to pull himself up. “Thanks for tolerating my company. It was nice.”

The pressure that’s built up inside Sara feels somewhat dissipated. It’s still there but its no longer urgent. It’s something she can live with. 

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr at riphunter.


End file.
